Blowing on dice has never looked so terrifying. Seated at a casino table over mixed drinks in Hong Kong, Gwyneth Paltrow is the angelic host for a deadly virus unknown to the world’s health agencies. Within days, she will be dead. (Don’t worry – it’s a spoiler that’s also given away in the trailer.) By the time of her vividly filmed autopsy, the infectious agent will have found its way to cities as widespread as Chicago, London, and Tokyo, raising the concerns of the expert few who will have begun to grasp the nightmare situation threatening to emerge.
     “Contagion” arrives in movie theaters this weekend, just as the nation commemorates the 10-year anniversary of one of its most fully realized nightmare scenarios. Following a decade informed by an epidemic of epidemics, whether in the form of terrorist attacks and endless wars, environmental shocks, and financial collapses that spread like viruses from one market to another, director Stephen Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns have picked one of the less-publicized dangers of the modern world as the basis of their film. Now the secret’s finally out – Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t the only one in trouble.
     Just how bad could things get? If we think we’ve seen the worst of the biohazard strain of international crises in the past decade, based on our dealings with the bird flu or H1N1 or SARS, the filmmakers emphatically tell us to think again. It could be a lot worse. Much worse, in fact. Worse to the point that parts of this movie bring to mind George Romero’s zombie classics.